Mildred’s voice had sunk almost to a whisper, and her eyes were filled with unshed tears. We did not speak for a few moments. I felt a lump rising in my throat and could only choke it down while I stroked the dear head that lay warm against my arm. My foolish questionings were stilled. The clear insight of this simple, true-hearted woman had pierced through and through my flimsy protests, and I sat awed and abashed. Presently she went on in her natural, common-sense way to explain more definitely what she meant. “I mean to make a little more beauty in this world, if I can,” she said, “and accomplish some more important things as well; but the art of all arts which I shall try to learn and teach is the one which we Americans most need to study, the art of simple living. “I shall have the pictures and the books, the statues and the music that I love; but what matters it whether they are all in my own home or not, or whether or not I seek them in galleries open to all alike? Not until our glaring, stony streets are made less dreary by more trees and fountains and statues, not until there is a little beauty for every one, can I claim the moral right to spend a fortune on Meissoniers or ancient Satsuma, for my own private delight. “For a long time I have been thinking of what could bring the greatest stimulus and joy into the lives of the wretched poor in our great city; the washerwomen and truckmen and foul-mouthed, dirty little street _gamins_ whose highest bliss is reached with the attainment of a full stomach and the sight of a street fight or a circus procession. It would be folly to give them money outright; but here in amusements, just as I have found it in regard to tenement houses and everything else, coöperation is the key to success. “The gift of a Peabody Museum or a Hemenway Gymnasium does not offend the pride or help to pauperize the Harvard student, nor do the Lowell lectures make the most cultivated people of Boston count themselves recipients of charity when they crowd the hall to hear Professor Morse talk about Japanese pottery, or the Englishman Haweis discourse on music. Money given like that, in a large way, in the enjoyment of which all unite, never does the harm that the gift to the individual would surely do. “Now, I propose to set up a counter-attraction to the delights of the saloon and the dance-hall and the street; and I shall put it right where it is most needed. There shall be one substantial, clean, beautiful building, a beacon light of beauty and delight in a square mile of dinginess and discomfort. “It shall be of brick, and I shall enjoin upon my architect to show what beautiful lines and arches can be wrought in simple material. In a street of ugly straight lines and right angles, this shall stand as an object-lesson in the power of creating perpetual pleasure to the eye by such simple devices as the substitution of the curve for the straight line over door and window.